Softimage|XSI Foundation 4.2
by Jeremy Rayment

The Background

Something funny happened on the road to 3d independence. It suddenly became affordable! At Siggraph 2004, Softimage announced a new pricing structure for its flagship 3d production suite XSI. At the entry level, XSI Foundation formerly 95, now weighs in at 5 (which until December of 2004 included a 5 DVD training set. The DVD training set was a limited time offer which was valid only through December of 2004). Entry level you say? I know what you are thinking. Companies typically cripple a products features to lower the price point, and the result is having to re-mortgage the house to pay for the features that were removed. How does XSI Foundation stack up with the likes of other professional level packages? Well for starters you can checkout the XSI software comparison guide at Softimage's web site for a full breakdown of all the features for all three models including the recently announced 4.2 features. For more detailed information specifically on XSI Foundation, stick with me as I try out Softimage's entry level 3d production application.

In the Box

XSI Foundation shipped with a printed reference manual, complete electronic documentation, online help, and .pdf introduction learning tutorials. I spent a great deal of time engaged in the DVD-ROM training materials and while they collectively provided a very good video overview of the tools, features and workflow, they lacked somewhat in the actual application of the tools, particularly in the modeling sections. I would have liked to have seen more project based tutorials covering specific examples of production in XSI. On the good side, the XSI community is rich with knowledgeable and helpful users, and there are many free tutorials both on Softimage's web site and or 3rd party sites, so getting up to speed with XSI Foundation was pretty straight forward.

Modeling

The modeling toolset in XSI Foundation is definitely not crippled. In fact, XSI Foundation's modeling workflow has some of the best implementations of modeling tools I have worked with in any 3d application. XSI Foundation supports both polygon modeling and nurbs modeling. The first step for many modelers is to setup background reference planes and XSI Foundations rotoscoping features are very powerful. You can load an image, and tweak parameters like brightness, hue, saturation and even add blur. What this means is you can adjust your reference planes to work cleanly (i.e. adding and manipulation points, polygons or edges on top of your images) within the XSI Foundation interface, saving having to make edits in Photoshop or some other image editor.

rotoscoping

To create a model you can start with either nurbs primitives (arc, circle, spiral, square, etc) or polygon-based primitives (cube, sphere, disc, cylinder, etc.) or you may choose to create your own nurbs/curves-based or polygon-based object from the foundation up, using a very good selection of creation-based tools like the sketch tool for nurbs curves and standard point by point or polygon tools for polygon meshes.

With nurbs modeling you can create profile curves and choose to revolve the curve over itself or an axis to create your shapes and models. In this example I have an arc primitive that I have revolved around itself to create this foot-ball shape.

nurbs modelling

You can also choose to select four nurbs curves or profiles and create geometric shapes which have contours or fluid form or shape. In this example I am using four nurbs curves to create this fluid curved shape. Other examples of functions with nurbs include extrusions, lofts, filets, and more. The downside of modeling with nurbs is you are forced to patch or stitch together separate nurbs surfaces in order to create whole models. In the case of the football this wasn't necessary, but for modeling a character you would have to stitch together many nurbs surfaces to make a fluid mesh. XSI Foundation provides a good set of tools to make this process somewhat painless, but there is a reason why many character modelers are using polygon tools and not nurbs, as this process can slow down creativity.

4 sided nurbs

Softimage took some heat when they decided to focus their attention on their implementation of the subdivision modeling (polygon modeling) tools. The nurbs toolset hasn't really seen any recent major upgrades, and still lacks some other implementations found in other 3d packages. For example there are no patch modeling functions as in 3d Max or Lightwave, so 3d sketching a model's outline and then patching sections with polygons isn't possible. Patch modeling creates a continuous flow of polygons within the boundaries of the splines (or nurbs curves). With the XSI Foundation nurbs toolset you must stitch together geometry sections in order to get a continuous mesh. That's the bad news. The good news is when Softimage decided to work on it's subdivision modeling tools they sure did a heck of a job.

When modeling in XSI Foundation you can create nurbs-based geometry (like shown above), and then simply convert it to a polygon object for further refinement using the polygon editing tools. The first thing to note about XSI Foundation is that it supports native editing with points, faces (polygons), and or edges. That means virtually unlimited control over your objects shape, form and flow. The majority of modelling/detailing functions (i.e. bevel, extrude, duplicate, etc.) can occur on points, edges or faces, allowing for detailing otherwise requiring a lot more work. In this example, I am beveling edges to form a sharper crease within the cylinder, which would be ideal for armour or mechanical type objects. Weighting can also be done on the edge level allowing for even more control over your models shape.

edge details

The add edge tool lets you basically reshape or sculpt polygon flow by drawing edges where you want them to be. The add edges tool is also perfect for fixing badly shaped areas. The add edge tool and I have been spending a lot of time together!

add edge tool

Subdivisions of objects can be done a couple of ways, and XSI Foundation natively supports n-gons (more than 4 point on a polygon). The level of subdivisions can be set interactively by using the + or - keys to either increase of decrease the your objects subdivision level. The ways to edit a polygon mesh are numerous. You can use deformers like bend, buldge, shear, or any number of additional tools like the knife, booleans, bridge and many many more. The one minor modeling workflow omission that I have grown accustomed to in Lightwave is the ability to highlight a series of points and use the transformation tools to affect only the points that are highlighted individually. In XSI all the points that are selected are moved or transformed at the same time. The m key lets you do this to some degree, but the movement of one point affects all the others that are selected.

interactive subdivisions

XSI Foundation also has a number of selection modes that make highlighting geometry a snap. For example, you can pick an edge and select a pre-defined function which will automatically select entire loops of geometry, or will automatically grow selections or even invert selections. A wide range of selection functions are present for edges, points and polygons and the selection function even works across different modes. You could then in practise, highlight a series of points and select adjacent edges, or polygons. Selecting geometry in this manner is very efficient and modeling workflow is greatly enhanced as a result.

selection functions

Overall modeling is XSI Foundation is top notch. The polygon modeling tools are easy to use and provide you all the power you need to model virtually anything your heart desires. The nurbs tools while a little outdated by today's standards are still more than enough to be used in production. The fact nurbs modeling methods are interchangeable means you can start a model with nurbs and then finish it with polygons, effectively getting the best of both worlds.

Surfacing and Texturing

XSI Foundation has a wealth of texturing and surfacing options. You surface via the node-based surface tree which is linear-based as opposed to layer- based. XSI Essentials and Advanced both have a texture layer interface which lets you surface functionally using layers, but this feature is not present in XSI Foundation. So if layer-based surfacing is important to you, you will need to upgrade to XSI Essentials or XSI Advanced. In addition, there is a complete texture view which give you access to all the tools and features in neatly organized view ports that sit on top of your XSI interface.

texture editor

I am partial to the cel shaded look and XSI Foundation has a very good integrated toon shader that gives you plenty of options for both colour zones and ink lines. This example demonstrates a simple surfacing flow in the render tree applying the toon shader. I have added a flat light node to flatten the lighting on the black mask area. The node-based tools included are plenty. Everything from colour correction tools, to gradients, bump maps, particles, warp effects and much much more. Each node affects the other nodes in the flow you specify based on the underlying channels present in each particular node. Anyone who has used a node-based compositor will feel right at home, and I personally find this approach very refreshing and powerful.

node surfacing

Pushing q in the camera view port enables your real time feedback preview or render region, and with a selection dragged out, any changes you make to your surfaces are updated in real time. A great workflow for experimentation and surface tweaks as no preview renders are required.

render region preview

For all you character professionals, there is a full compliment of UV tools supporting all standard projection methods. The texture editor is easy to use and has some great tools like the proportional modeling/ fall off tool to grab UV's and put them into place.

uv editing

Overall it is difficult to find much wrong with the surfacing tools in XSI Foundation other than the fact that not all 3d artists will find the node-based approach of surfacing to their liking. To that end, the addition of the layer-based editor would be a welcome addition to the XSI Foundation product, in order to reach a more broad range of artists.

Animation

XSI Foundation has some unique and powerful animation controls for character animators and animators alike. The timeline controls and dope sheet are super intuitive to use and get you animating quickly. In addition, the scene editor gives you a hierarchal view of your model's data which is being animated. From the scene editor you can access numeric pages which let you animate precisely. You can animated via function curves or expressions and everything ties into the motion mixer. More on the motion mixer in a bit.

animation controls

XSI Foundation allows for internal or external storage of animation data which lets you quickly and easily create presets for use with other models. The way things are structured you can setup sort of like animation parents. A main category of model, say "box", can have animation data set on it. In the same scene you can have a couple of other models with variations of the data applied or you can quickly copy the animation from "box" to another model by simply dragging and dropping any animation from "box" to a second or third object.

Character animators won't be disappointed. XSI Foundation lets you create you own rigs from scratch with its built in skeleton 2d and 3d chains. You can use primitives (curves or polygons) to setup controls for each part of your rig and there is full IK, FK support for all character rigs. The Advanced and Essentials packages come with more advanced character tools, including biped rigs and quadroped rigs, full auto-rig capabilities, and the SDK for customizing your own character tools based on Softimage's coded structure. XSI Foundation users fear not! Jeff Norombaba, an XSI user has released a series of scripts and toolbars (4.2 scripts) (version 4.0 scripts are here) that give Foundation users full access to the biped rigs and auto rig capabilities. 5 is looking pretty good right about now! I asked Jeff to highlight some of his favourite features of XSI Foundation and the following is his take.

Jeff Norombaba - Feature #1:
Construction modes will allow for modifications to your model after it has been enveloped. So say for example that you have a character that is textured, enveloped and animated and you wanted to make a modeling change. Without construction modes the process of going up the stack would in most cases require re-enveloping the character, which can be time consuming and require a lot of tweaking. However with construction modes you can add geometry and change the model at any point. Accompanying the construction mode is the display, which allow you to view the changes in the current mode while viewing the impact on the result. Setting a view port to sync with current will display the result of the selected construction mode only. So as you tweak points in modeling mode, another view port can display the model with all the operator stacks applied (result).

Feature #2:
Ghosting is a very powerful feature in XSI 4.0 that allows just about any objects animation to be previewed with frames before and after. It also allows for tweaking the colors and the number of frames. I have found this tool very useful for creating and tweaking walk cycles. Setting up the frame step to ½ or ¼ of the desired cycle will give you a ghost that will mirror the pose, then it is a simple matter of matching up one side with the other and key framing. Ghosting can also be used to preview simulations this feature is very useful for quickly editing dynamics to get the specific look you are looking for.

Jeff Norombaba feature

A special thank you to Jeff for his contribution in this review and for his work on the scripts for XSI Foundation users. Now as they say, on with the rest of the show! Motion mixer is Softimage's way of taking animation data and treating it much like you would in any NLE video editor in that you can take animation clips and layer them, transition them, and even re-animate them. It is a great way to create subtle animation effects like blending or more advanced effects like facial animation. In terms of use, motion mixer's controls and functions are very well implemented. The DVD training does an excellent job of getting you up to speed showcasing simple and more complex effects alike.

motion mixer

Rendering

XSI Foundation supports a wide range of still image formats (.tif, .bmp, .tga, rla, jpeg) and video formats (.avi, .mov) and the render options panel is straight forward and easy to follow. Full multi-pass rendering is supported, as is ray tracing, motion blur, particles, cel or toon rendering and much more. XSI Foundation integrates with and uses Mental Ray as its renderer of choice so you know the quality of outputs is extremely high.

render panel

One major omission from XSI Foundation's rendering options is any kind of vector output for the Flash format, or advanced level shockwave .w3d. The native plugin for shockwave (.w3d) downloadable from Softimage's web site doesn't support bones. Erain used to make a version of it's Swift 3d plugin but has since stopped selling it. At this price point XSI Foundation is bound to attract web designers, and new media professionals and web 3d/Flash features would be great assets to say nothing of the fact that every other major 3d player has some form of vector output and or shockwave output/web-based export.

Conclusion

3 years ago if you would have told me I could get the features and power provided in XSI Foundation for a mere 5 you would have had me committed! The fact remains that XSI Foundation is available for only 5 (including the DVD training set) and it is powerful. XSI Foundation does lack some features that are included in both the XSI Essentials and XSI Advanced packages, and are also more standard in XSI Foundation's immediate competition, most notably hair, a polygon reduction tool, and a layer-based texture solution. The omission of any sort of vector output / shockwave option is also an oversight I hope to see dealt with in future versions, but overall XSI Foundation could stand up to most artists/animators workflow. In fact any artist looking either to get into professional level 3d for the first time or any 3d artists/animators looking to enhance their toolset should seriously look at XSI Foundation. The modeling tools (in particular the polygon tools), are as good, or in many cases better than other more expensive packages. Integrated auto rigging, cel shading, motion mixing, node surfacing, top notch UV editing tools, real time open gl previews, the list goes on and on and on. I am happy to say that professional level 3d has arrived for the masses, and that XSI Foundation is just about the best value in 3d software on the market.

Article Rating

What We Liked

• Rotoscoping
• Polygon modeling toolset
• Edge tool
• Native cel shading and inking tools
• Great UV editing tools
• Node-based surfacing
• Motion Mixer
• Auto rigging
• Intuitive character toolset
• Mental Ray renderer
• Overall learning tools provided were excellent (the combination of pdf, DVD, and online help)
• Real time render views in camera view port
• Great technical and customer support

What Should be Improved

• Memory requirements are a tad steep. (my workstation, a Dell precsion 450 2 GHz XEON with 512 megs of ram and an Ati Fire GL X1 128 meg card) showed some minor performance lags particularly in startup
• No Vector/Shockwave output
• No patch modeling
• No MAC version
• Hair is an expensive upgrade (XSI Advanced is required for hair at 95). An entry level hair shader should be included if XSI Foundation is to be used for character work as an integrated solution. Or at least hair should be offered at a reasonable upgrade price. In other words I personally don't feel it necessary to force users to buy XSI Advanced just to get basic hair functionality. Not when the competition all has basic hair included or at a price in the 0 range as a separate plugin.

Recommended System Requirements

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (including SP1 and SP1a). In some cases, a hot fix is needed for a known issue with the Windows XP Professional OS noted here: Q328979 . This will resolve a cosmetic issue within XSI where the Edit Boxes appear grey instead of black (making it difficult to see text). Please click here to consult our KB article on this issue. Windows 2000 SP2 or higher.

Red Hat Linux version 7.3, 8.0 9.0 or Enterprise version 3 Default GNOME window manager or KDE recommended. You should also be able to run XSI on other Linux distributions provided you keep to the following guidelines, including the above required components: Kernel: 2.4.18-3 - 2.6.5 XFree86, XFree86-libs: 4.2.0, 4.3.0 Window managers: Metacity, KDE, Sawfish (without "follow mouse focus" policy), twm, WindowMaker, Enlightenment glibc: 2.2.x, 2.3.x The following components are also required: libjpeg, libncurses, e2fsprogs, fam The following components are required mainly during the installation process: sed, textutils, grep, fileutils, xinetd, bzip2, tar.

Hardware Workstation with AMD K7 or higher processor Workstation with Intel Pentium III or higher processor OpenGL accelerated graphics card 520 MB of available hard disk space for full install. Additional space required during setup for decompressing files. 1280x1024 screen resolution recommended 256 MB RAM minimum, 512 MB RAM recommended 3-button mouse Access to a CD-ROM drive to run the Setup program and to access the online documentation (if it is not installed on your hard drive)